On Spitzer's Bookshelf, A How-Not-To History For Governing the State

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: December 2, 2007

Rudolph W. Giuliani has been talking up the new book by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. Mitt Romney reads Thomas L. Friedman on globalization and Doris Kearns Goodwin on Lincoln. John McCain quotes from Hemingway's ''For Whom the Bell Tolls.''

What about Eliot Spitzer?

Flying back from an environmental summit in Portugal this fall, he devoured a 40-year-old biography of one of his predecessors as governor of New York -- a Republican, Charles Evans Hughes.

The book is subtitled ''Politics and Reform in New York,'' a vanilla description of Hughes's destructive struggle with the State Legislature after his election in 1906 to the first of two two-year terms. It is one of several political histories Mr. Spitzer has read lately; another was Robert A. Slayton's biography of Gov. Alfred E. Smith.

Mr. Spitzer ''believes in the value of learning from the experiences of effective governors who came before him,'' his spokeswoman, Christine Anderson, said.

So far, most of Mr. Spitzer's first year as governor seems to have been dominated by two issues. His administration's iron-fisted offensive managed to make a martyr out of Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader. And his proposal to grant driver's licenses to illegal immigrants -- whatever its merits -- was a nonstarter that nearly dragged down Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, too.

''There are governors who have seen their popularity decline in the first year because they achieved something,'' said Richard Norton Smith, a biographer of two New York governors, Thomas E. Dewey and Nelson A. Rockefeller. ''With Spitzer, it seems like he's walked into buzz-saws of his own devising.''

Hughes was inaugurated in 1907, exactly 100 years before Mr. Spitzer. Like Mr. Spitzer, Hughes was a serious, dogged investigator. He was not a professional politician, and unlike Mr. Spitzer, at that point in his career he had no burning political ambition.

Just before he declared his candidacy, Hughes wrote his parents that he was disinclined to run for governor, that he got ''a cold sweat'' just contemplating the two alternatives: being defeated in a grueling campaign or winning and having to spend his term in Albany.

But he was finally persuaded by President Theodore Roosevelt, another former New York governor whom Mr. Spitzer idolizes. Roosevelt warned Hughes to ''cut out relentlessly and without regard to consequences everything evil, paying no heed whatever to the influence or opposition of any man who may be affected thereby.''

Roosevelt liked to say that it's not the critic who counts, it's the guy in the arena.

But as Hughes learned, some of the critics -- particularly the legislative leaders whom he personally castigated and apparently figured he could govern without -- were hardy perennials primarily motivated by their own survival. They had seen crusading governors come and go.

If Mr. Spitzer figures that all his problems will evaporate if Democrats seize control of the State Senate next November (for the first time since 1965), history says he might want to be careful about what he wishes for. Hughes's chief adversaries were his fellow Republicans.

Robert Wesser, who wrote ''Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905-1910'' (Cornell University Press, 1967), concluded that he was insecure as a politician and ineffective as a party reformer. He would not bargain with lawmakers. And when he appealed directly to the voters, he ''moved ahead of public opinion and never efficiently enlisted its support.''

Topping his political reform agenda was legislation to let the voters, instead of boss-dominated conventions, nominate statewide candidates. But all Hughes had to show for his dramatic battle for his direct primary bill, Mr. Wesser wrote, ''was the satisfaction of having made the fight, not having won it.''

The Hughes biography was recommended to Mr. Spitzer by Bruce N. Gyory, a respected Albany lobbyist and student of state history.

A few days after returning from Portugal, Mr. Spitzer named Mr. Gyory his senior adviser. One week later, Mr. Spitzer hinted that he might rescind his driver's license proposal, and he subsequently did so. Last week, he graciously appealed to alienated fellow Democrats in the Legislature to give him a second chance.

If the question being raised among New Yorkers is whether Mr. Spitzer has the judgment to succeed as governor, the consensus seems to be that he may already be learning as much from Hughes's mistakes as from Teddy Roosevelt's triumphs.

''I'm not naturally suited to this job, perhaps,'' Mr. Spitzer said in an interview. He hastened to add, in Hughesian self-justification, ''but maybe, at this point in time, we need someone who is not naturally suited to it to get done the transformative things that the public wants done.'' And then, suggesting again that he is open to learning, the governor added, ''There's an art there that I would like to be more successful at.''

Mr. Smith, the biographer, recalled that Dewey, like Mr. Spitzer a former prosecutor, arrived in Albany with guns drawn against the Democrats, but that ''one measure of his success as governor is he learned to coexist with that which he didn't care for.''

''The question,'' Mr. Smith said, ''is not only can they learn from their mistakes but can they adapt in a way their previous experience hasn't prepared them for.''

Or, as former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo said not long ago, Mr. Spitzer has the intellect to be a great governor. It doesn't take much more, Mr. Cuomo said diplomatically, ''except learning the process.''

It has been 11 months since Mr. Spitzer took office. But, as Thomas R. Suozzi, the Nassau County executive whom Spitzer defeated last year for the Democratic nomination, said the other day, ''there's no such thing as irreparable damage in politics.''

After Charles Evans Hughes suffered his most humiliating defeat -- when the Legislature flatly rebuffed his direct primary bill, despite entreaties by former President Roosevelt and even President William Howard Taft -- one Albany boss boasted: ''We no longer worship the gods. We laugh at them.''

Still, you could argue that Hughes had the last laugh.

He was rescued from Albany by Taft and placed on the United States Supreme Court.

And, as one state senator remarked presciently to fellow legislators who were glad to see the governor go: ''The name of Governor Hughes will be remembered long after the name of every man occupying a seat in this chamber has been forgotten.''

PHOTO: Gov. Eliot Spitzer, above in his New York City office, is trying to learn from past governors of New York, like Charles Evans Hughes, far left, embattled early in his career, and Alfred E. Smith, a four-time governor first elected in 1918. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMES ESTRIN/THE NEW YORK TIMES; UNDERWOOD AND UNDERWOOD; THE NEW YORK TIMES)